Insurance companies use various techniques and data to investigate damage or loss claims submitted by property owners. For example, after an accident or loss, a property owner typically files a claim with his or her insurance company, and in response to the claim, the insurance company may assign an appraiser to investigate the claim. The appraiser determines the extent of damage and/or loss, documents the damage, and provides the property owner with appropriate compensation.
The process for determining and documenting the extent of the damage can be inefficient and time consuming. For example, an insurance appraiser may take photos of a roof of a building to assess a claim for roof damage or multiple photos of a vehicle to assess accident damage. In some instances, the property owner may submit photos of the damaged property. Two-dimensional digital pictures or videos of a structure or vehicle, however, often provide inadequate detail for a thorough inspection of the claimed damage. Poor image quality resulting from camera movement or out-of-focus images can make it difficult to estimate the condition of a property based on an image. Even where image quality is adequate, poor angles or bad lighting may hide or exaggerate details important to estimating the condition of the structure, leading to inaccurate assessments of the structure's condition. The two-dimensional digital pictures, however, can be converted into three-dimensional models. In addition, in some instances, an appraiser or property owner may directly capture three-dimensional models of the damaged property, for example, using photogrammetry, active depth capture via infrared, and the like. The appraiser can view such three-dimensional models in a web, mobile, or desktop application via a two-dimensional display screen, a virtual reality device, or an augmented reality device.
The three-dimensional models typically generate massive polygonal or point cloud datasets. Interactive rendering of such massive geometry in web-based computer applications can be impractical due to the performance penalty for data throughput and the associated large memory storage requirements. Mesh simplification is a technology that can facilitate more performant rendering for interactive 3D applications, but such mesh simplification is not typically available in web-based development pipelines.